


Advent: Wedding

by FyrMaiden



Series: Klaine Advent 2014 [20]
Category: Glee
Genre: Gay Bashing, Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 07:04:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2842295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrMaiden/pseuds/FyrMaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the Klaine Advent 2014 Prompt: Wedding</p>
<p>(Ghost story, major violent incident cited but not graphic, proceed with caution)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Advent: Wedding

The loft is cheap. That’s why they agree to take it on. It is old, vast, unfurnished, and it is cheap. The landlord doesn’t try to sell its good points, although he does point out that there is a functioning bathroom, and there’s a gas supply for the kitchen. He waves to an area across the emptiness of the space, where there is a sink and a place to put an oven in, albeit there is no oven in it. Kurt and Rachel, both in need of somewhere to live and able to afford six months in this space if they pool their resources, agree that this is perfect, even as they both know that it’s further from NYADA than they would have been strictly happy with, a longer ride on the subway than is entirely comfortable, and all around entirely impractical for two teenagers with zero income to be able to renovate or furnish. They move in less than a week later, celebrate with pizza they also can’t really afford, and sleep on mattresses on the floor for a week whilst they try to locate beds that are within their budget before both of them cave in and ask their parents to buy them this one thing and then they’ll be totally independent. Promise.

They’ve been in the loft almost a month when the weirdness starts. They received an old piano from Rachel’s dads, because they think it will add character to their home. After that, their delineated rooms with curtain dividers begin sway in a non-existent breeze. They notice that there are random cold spots, and an almost constant sense of being watched. At night, there is the trace of piano music, too clear to come from downstairs, but too faint to be inside with them. Often, the TV loses signal and they turn it on to a blank screen and have to retrack the channels all over again. There is nothing big. Their food doesn’t spoil, their property isn’t damaged, but they’re both aware that something is wrong.

When Santana moves in with them and takes up residence on their couch, she is the first to say out loud that she’s woken up in the night to find a face staring at her. The first time she sees the face hovering in front of her, she screams and scrambles for the light. When she turns it on, the face has disappeared. She tells herself it was the vestige of a dream, and tries to go back to sleep. The face continues to appear, though, watching her in the darkness. The longer it goes on, the more she starts to feel as if it’s not threatening her. It feels protective, if anything, and she likes that someone in this city, in this thrumming mass of people, worries that she makes it home each night.

“What does he look like?” Kurt asks her when she raises the subject over breakfast. They can hear Rachel in the bathroom, where she has been for almost half an hour. Soon she will be finished, and they will be able to eat. Kurt has started pancakes in preparation and is standing in the kitchen with an apron on and frying pan held in one hand, ready to flip the pancakes in it onto the waiting plate. Santana narrows her eyes at him.

“He?” she says, arching her eyebrow and cocking her head. She puts the coffee pot she is holding down on the tabletop and straightens to meet him eye to eye. “Did I say it was a he?”

“Okay, ‘it’,” Kurt responds. “What does it look like?”

Santana shrugs, gathers plates and lays them out, three of them around the table. She shivers as she passes the end of the table, drops the fourth plate in her hands, shrieks as it seems to hover in the air for a moment before clattering the the ground in one piece. She sinks into a free chair and covers her face with her hands, heaves a shuddering breath. Kurt plates the pancakes and pulls out the chair beside her, rests his hand on her shoulder.

“Do you want to talk?” he says, his voice soft, and she shakes her head.

“No,” she says, and then, “You’ve seen him though, haven’t you?”

Kurt doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. They both know it’s true.

*

They finally talk about it when Santana hurls the television remote at an unsuspecting cushion and yells that they need to figure this out, because if she misses her shows because of a goddamn ghost, she is going to actually lose her mind. “Doesn’t he have better things to do?” she asks the emptiness, and jumps when the TV retunes to her shows, the volume too high. She grabs the remote and turns it down, settles herself into the corner of the couch. She moves once more to change into her warmest pajamas, the ones with feet, and wraps a blanket around herself. “C’mon,” she breathes, tucking her fingers between her thighs for warmth. “This is ridiculous.”

Slowly, slowly, the temperature returns, and when Kurt and Rachel come home, she has put the blanket away and pinned her hair up behind her head. When Kurt drops his bag on a chair in the kitchen and Rachel has hung up her coat and scarf, Santana says, over her shoulder and in greeting, “We need to find out what he wants.”

Kurt says nothing, and Rachel nods her head. Slowly, they both head toward the sofa, Rachel sinking onto the opposite end to Santana, her hands on her knees and her spine ramrod straight. Kurt perches on the arm of the chair his dad made from him, adapted from an old car seat. “How?” he says. “We can’t even see him most of the time.”

Rachel sighs and looks between them, her face troubled and her mouth a tight line. “I know how,” she says. She’s silent for a long beat, and then, “My grandma has a ouija board in her attic. Her best friend was a table rattler, she said, so she had one mostly for the look of it? I don’t think it’s been used. I - I could ask my dad to send it?”

“I don’t-” Kurt starts, and stops when Santana glares at him.

“When you’ve spent an evening on this sofa in your wooliest winter pajamas, ladyboy, you can have an opinion.”

Kurt rolls his eyes and pushes himself upright. “Fine,” he says. “We try and speak to him. Get the stupid board, Rachel.” He throws his hands up and turns away from both of them. “On your heads be it when you open some kind of portal to hell.”

*

There’s no portal to hell.

The ouija board comes whilst they are out, and Kurt arranges for it to be redelivered the next day instead. When the girls come home, prompted by a text reminder that this was their idea, he has pushed all of their furniture to the edges of the loft, leaving only the board on a small table in the centre. Around the space he has lit small votive candles, and left cushions on the floor for them to sit upon. Santana whistles beneath her breath, takes in the square footage, and glances at Rachel sidelong.

“I’m sleeping on your couch when there’s this much room?” she says. Rachel ignores her as she finds somewhere to put her things, and finally settles for resting her bag on the floor and her coat over a chair. Happy with her choice, she finally looks at Santana.

“When you contribute to the rent, you can have your own room. Until then, you get the couch and a shelf in the refrigerator.”

Santana arches an eyebrow and crosses her arms beneath her breasts, and turns back to the table, walks toward it and kneels on one of the scattered cushions. She pushes the planchard across the board with her finger. “Wanky,” she murmurs, sees her breath cloud in front of her and feels a cold hand cover hers. The planchard wobbles and moves.

‘Hello.’

She jumps and snatches her hand back, glances around her. There is nothing except Rachel at the door, and the sound of the flush from their bathroom.

“Santana?” Kurt says, pushing the bathroom door closed. She stares at him and at the board, at the wobbling planchard still highlighting the greeting.

“This is a stupid idea,” she says. “I don’t-”

“He’s here,” Kurt says, nodding. “He wants to talk.” He beckons Rachel closer, and gestures for her to take the cushion to his left. He points Santana to the one on his right. Santana glares at the board, and then at the probably not empty space on her right. She thinks about the face she sees in the night, and how it’s never been threatening. She thinks about its wide eyes and reassuring smile, and she reaches for the planchard again.

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s play.”

*

His name is Blaine. He has to spell it twice for them. He isn’t sure how old he is. He remembers his 13th birthday, but doesn’t remember any of the ones after that. His thirteenth birthday was in 2008.

Out loud, Santana says, “You don’t look thirteen.” A pulse of warmth washes over the board, and Santana feels a hand take hers briefly. She looks at Kurt and then at Rachel, who stares at her hand.

“The piano,” Rachel says, eventually. “Is that you?”

‘Yes.’ That answer is firm, clear. Rachel smiles slightly.

“Is the piano yours?”

The planchard wobbles, but doesn’t move.

‘Yes.’

Her nod is sad, and she takes her fingers from the marker for a moment, turns to look at the old upright, pushed as it is against the wall. Across the table from Kurt, the shadow of a body becomes visible as his voice becomes heard. Kurt watches as he solidifies, the neat parting of his hair very precise, the width of his shoulders impressive. It’s his eyes that stop his heart for a beat though, familiar from the months of seeing him in half glimpses and dreams. Familiar because he remembers reading about him in the local paper in Lima, remembers thinking that that could have been him, that he’d been lucky, all things considered… Blaine Anderson, bashed for his sexuality, clinging to life in the ICU. He snaps his fingers from the wobbling planchard, his mouth dry and his taste for this gone. He pushes himself to his feet.

“I want that piano back in Lima,” he says, pointing at it. “I want it returned to his parents. I want-” He covers his face and spins uselessly for a second. “I want-”

He doesn’t know he’s crying until he’s enveloped in the shadow of an embrace, until Rachel’s arms envelope him in a real one, until Santana uncovers his chair and pushes him into it and hands him warm tea and a tissue to wipe his eyes. Across the room, at the table, Blaine sits with his fingers on the planchard, staring at it with all his might. Kurt’s voice wobbles when he speaks.

“Can you-” he says, and breaks, waits, tries again. “Can you ask what he needs? From us?”

Santana inclines her head, takes Rachel with her, and they sit together, their fingers on the marker. It moves quickly now, and Rachel relays the message. “He says he’s sorry,” she calls, and Kurt tucks his feet up off of the floor, hugs his knees. “He says he thinks you’re beautiful, too.” Kurt laughs and closes his eyes, the sound wet and wounded, and Rachel finishes, “He says he wishes he could know you better, Kurt. He says thank you for caring.”

Kurt doesn’t say anything further, but does ask his dad, when he has his voice under control, to find out where the Andersons live, and if he can afford the time to take a battered old upright piano to them. His dad agrees and the piano is gone within the week.

The cold goes with it.

*

Soon after that, in a small room in a hospital in Columbus, a young man’s eyes open for the first time in five years.

Amongst his first words is a name, uttered by a voice creaking with disuse.

“Kurt.”


End file.
